Anniversary Weekend Torturers Tour drops by Dick Cheney’s place

On Saturday former Vice President Cheney’s $3.3 million 8,000 Square foot house on Chain Bridge Rd. in MacLean Virginia was the site of a protest demonstration. The Cheney house on Code Pink’s "Guantanamo Anniversary Weekend Torturers Tour." is reported to be a ten minute walk from CIA headquarters. Two of the twenty demonstrators some clad in orange prison jumpsuits, walked up to the house and refused to leave after police asked them to.

The protesters from the anti-war group Code Pink walked up to the house before police arrived and asked them to leave, said Fairfax County police spokesman Roger Henriquez. Two members who refused to go were arrested on trespassing charges, he said.

Another Code Pink group demonstrated without incident outside the home of CIA Director John Brennan, also in the Washington, D.C. suburb of McLean, as part of its “Guantanamo Anniversary Weekend Torturers Tour.”

A U.S. Senate report last month said the CIA misled the White House and public about its torture of detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and acted more brutally and pervasively than it acknowledged.

Fourteen years after Guantanamo prison opened and after the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation made public some of the horrific methods used, Cheney remains unapologetic about his role in US torture or harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects. He appeared recently on Meet the Press and stated he would do it all again in a minute. “I’d do it again in a minute,” said Dick Cheney.

No doubt he happily would, but there are problems with the examples from history he uses to justify his actions.Here is just one of the six debunked central claims Cheney uses when defending the legality of water boarding

Japanese soldiers were prosecuted “for a lot of stuff. Not for waterboarding,” Cheney said. “To draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding judged by our Justice Department not to be torture and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March and the slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the rape of Nanking and all of the other crimes they committed, that’s an outrage. It’s a really cheap shot.”

In fact, at an international tribunal convened in 1946, Japanese soldiers were put on trial for water-torture techniques including waterboarding, with some defendants sentenced to hanging and others to long prison terms.[added emphasis]

That’s an unimaginable outrage to the former Vice President; punishing someone responsible for waterboarding torture. To him it may be a kind of “quaint concept”, you know like Bush’s Justice Department said of the Geneva Convention.